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NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

economist.com

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Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#61

Post by awesomeusername »

johndough wrote: post #14
mirekrusin wrote: post #12

If mythos can break into almost all of their classified systems in hours then other models including opus, gpt, gemini and large open weight models can do so as well, maybe you'll have to double hours or it may become days, but they also will, there is no "maybe" in here. State sponsored, non-public penetration fine tunes (of possibly public ones) likely can do it even faster. Unsupervised penetration RL loop is idea…

I don't think that is necessarily true. - With a weaker model, the time to break into the system might grow so larger that it becomes infeasible, similar to how password hashes can be bruteforced, but if the password is long enough, that is not going to happen in our lifetime. - There might be problems which are inherently unsolvable with a lower level of intelligence. For example, your dog won't derive calculus from…

Dogs deriving calculus:

https://www.csun.edu/~dgray/BE528/Pennigs2003Dogs_Calculus.p...

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#64

Post by mikewarot »

It's sad that they did the research[1] and solved computer security about 40 years ago[2], and then proceeded to lose that hard won knowledge over time.

[1] https://csrc.nist.rip/publications/history/index_1.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#66

Post by Humorist2290 »

It must be a wild time in the corporate espionage world these days. The annual operating budget of the CIA is like 20B. That's a rounding error compared to the burn rates of these labs.

Maybe it's conspiratorial, but it seems like the direction this is going is for the US to nationalize these companies. Somewhere between "too big to fail" and "national security."

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#67

Post by tra3 »

mikewarot wrote: post #64

It's sad that they did the research[1] and solved computer security about 40 years ago[2], and then proceeded to lose that hard won knowledge over time. [1] https://csrc.nist.rip/publications/history/index_1.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS

I’m not familiar with this, but what does “solved” mean in this case? Guaranteed inability to compromise systems?

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#68

Post by chaitanyya »

How much of it is just exposing poor engineering practices people got away with because it was not economically viable earlier to spend human hours to exploit a system?

Not taking a dig at people, it was not a terrible choice earlier. Not like these models are inventing net new ways to exploit systems.

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#69

Post by ActorNightly »

chaitanyya wrote: post #68

How much of it is just exposing poor engineering practices people got away with because it was not economically viable earlier to spend human hours to exploit a system? Not taking a dig at people, it was not a terrible choice earlier. Not like these models are inventing net new ways to exploit systems.

Its not that.

I would bet a large sum of money that Mythos was put on the same local network as the "systems" (ie you have access to services like UPnP brokers that never meant for outside internet), and the "broke into" is just a blanket term for finding some bug which can range from simply crashing the program, to actual remote code execution. And its probably mostly the former. It used to be that cyber security research was all about finding ways to crash the program, which then implied that you can inject shell code, so the two became synonymous for vulnerability, but these days its very much not the case.

Re: NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"

#70

Post by mikewarot »

tra3 wrote: post #67
mikewarot wrote: post #64

It's sad that they did the research[1] and solved computer security about 40 years ago[2], and then proceeded to lose that hard won knowledge over time. [1] https://csrc.nist.rip/publications/history/index_1.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS

I’m not familiar with this, but what does “solved” mean in this case? Guaranteed inability to compromise systems?

Pretty much. If you've got a microkernel / capabilities based OS, the amount of mischief that someone can cause is severely reduced.

It's my belief that we can have general purpose, easy to use, secure computing for everyone.

No UAC crap, or horrible systems like AppArmor, no virus scanners, etc... just computers that do what you want, and only what you want.

We could have had it decades ago, if things had happened in a slightly different sequence order, related to the flood of personal computers.

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